I am driving down the highway in the middle of a snowstorm, thankfully traffic is light. The tree’s along the side of the road are beginning to take on splotches of white as if a giant marshmallow had exploded and little glops landed everywhere. The road surface is coated with just enough snow to instantly turn me into a spinning projectile at my first sudden move! I am heading back to work and given the road conditions, trying to decide which set of roads to take to minimize the opportunity of ingesting a stop sign or square dancing

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with a telephone pole. I am approaching the exit for one set of roads or should I go the other way? Hmm what to do, what to do. Slowing now as the exit looms just 50 ft away I am inexplicably stuck as if my ability to decide were cast upon the road surface with both feet jammed on the brake pedal and my thoughts entering a skid. Suddenly it’s not my thoughts it’s the car that’s skidding and I’m thinking my boss is going to kill me!(it’s his car) I watch as the car begins to perfectly enter the snow bank exactly in the middle of the fork created by the highway continuing on and the exit gently sloping to the right. Moments later I am stopped, now the heater motor and the windshield wipers keeping rhythm to my heart beating in my throat! Shock, stark and cold welled up in me, along with relief and anger and shame and thankfulness and embarrassment and a few others that in the midst of it all I can’t even remember. How 3 hours passed in 30 seconds I will never know, it hardly seems possible to have that many thoughts in those few seconds, especially because I have so few thoughts in any given day. Maybe I used a lifetime of thoughts up in that half a minute, before this one recurring thought finally settled upon me. “Indecision will get you in the end.”

Quite honestly I forget who even said it or why I remembered it, but I remembered it that day! I couldn’t decide why I remembered it. but I did. It all seems so surreal to me now as if that moment was perhaps given to me to drive home the point of that message. The message is: better to make a bad decision than no decision at all. I know that seems contrary to logic and lets hope we don’t all just throw caution to the wind and purposely try to make bad decisions. Making a bad decision is kind of like faith I think you look out ahead and see the intersection and think which way do I go, you take into account all the known variables and then you leap and if you figured incorrectly you might crash into something or figure after a while, this is the wrong way so we turn around and try the other way. though we may end up with some scars and bruises or even snap a branch or two off the old ego, we come out the other side hopefully the wiser for the experience.

How many times have we been paralyzed with indecision? Turning the thoughts over and over in your mind, seeking some secret to the puzzle or calling on those around you that seem to have all the answers but in this instance the cat not only took their tongue but performed a lobotomy as well. Fear, that’s what drives this, fear of the unknown, of being ridiculed, of making a mistake, of failure. When in reality 99.9 % of these decisions have very little of the imagined consequences. Our minds in cohorts with fear will take a simple problem and turn it into a final plunge into a soon to be active

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volcano creating a worst case scenario that James Bond couldn’t get out of! (and we all know that’s not possible)

Relax, breathe in deep( ahem, unless you’re in a smog filled city) and know that trying to make a good decision doesn’t make it a good decision but….

Indecision on the other hand pretty much guarantee’s you won’t be going anywhere fast!

Great post! At first I couldn’t decide whether or not to tell you that and I was stuck for about an hour waiting to decide… but then I thought what the hell tell him how much you like it! 😉 haha No, it really is good. You are so right about the paralyzing effects of indecision. I once had a very dear friend who REALLY struggled with this so much so that he never truly enjoyed his life. Sadly, he died of cancer at the age of 60. It always broke my heart that his life could have been so much more enjoyable for him if he would take a leap… ANY leap at all even a leap into the unknown. Thank you. I needed this today.

Actually Thank You, Your comments keep me going. That is so sad about your friend, he and my father had a lot of similarities, though my father died of Diabetes he unfortunately died with a lot of regrets. In an ironic twist his difficulties probably shaped my life and alternate attitude about things.

The paralysis from indecision is something my wife and I have been stricken with many times over the years. Two of our biggest allies are trust and prayer, praying is easy, you just have to remember to do it – trust not so much. Unfortunately my life is also riddled with ill thought through plans which have there own consequences.